Materiality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sarah Jackson.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project investigated how Classic Maya individuals understood the objects that archaeologists characterize as 'artifacts,' and applied this Maya material perspective to modern archaeological practices in order to transform how we interpret excavations at Classic Maya sites. To accomplish this, the project focused on three activities: reconstructing elements of a Classic Maya perspective on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Rodriguez.

Scholars have asked how empires solidify power when colonizers, the agents of empire-building, often have diverse goals and backgrounds and their actions do not necessarily support the goals of the empire. Two answers to this question have received much attention: that empires promote ideologies that support cohesion among colonizers, and that coercion and violence can promote the expansion of empires. I propose a third answer, in which colonizers create varied material forms that may challenge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

Non-invasive scientific analyses recently performed by the ‘MOLAB’ mobile laboratory on a number of pre-Hispanic and early colonial pictorial manuscripts provided a host of new data that deepen our knowledge of Mesoamerican coloring materials and painting practices. The huge corpus of available analytical data – obtained from codices Madrid, Cospi, Borgia, Vatican B, Laud, Fejérváry-Mayer, Nuttall, Bodley, Selden, Selden Roll, Tudela, Vatican A, and Mendoza – allows the first cultural-historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

This paper explores an alternative method for examining ephemeral aspects of material culture, such as sound, in the production processes of ceramic pre-Columbian aerophone construction. In a case study of a museum collection from the G-752Rj site in Greater Nicoya, I demonstrate that it is possible to identify groups of producers and evidence of knowledge transfer between persons that may reflect communities of practice. This research has the potential for examining regional trade and migration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only McClean Pink. Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting the use of material culture in mortuary contexts provides an intimate view of social identity of both the deceased and mourners in ancient societies. However, the material remains of mortuary practices throughout the Nabataean Kingdom in Jordan have not been systematically investigated. Comparing the material culture between contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Putsavage.

Scholars acknowledge that religious and secular rituals are difficult to distinguish. This is especially true in the archaeological record, where human beliefs and worldviews must be understood through material correlates. In order to make categories simpler to use, Western scholars have tended to dichotomize religious and secular. Exploring the role of Mesa Verde style mugs in the Ancestral Puebloan world, this paper takes an object biography approach and acknowledges that boundaries between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Benson.

The transition between early (AD 1050-1200) and late Mississippian (AD 1200-1350) in the American Bottom is recognized as a significant moment of socio-political and religious change in the historical trajectory of Cahokia. During this time, relationships between persons, places, and things transformed, resulting in different ways of engaging with both Cahokia and the non-human powers that underwrote it and the broader Mississippian world. With a goal of investigating a Moorehead phase...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Barber. Arthur Joyce. Petra Cunningham-Smith. Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food was central to the constitution of sacred public spaces during the Formative period in the lower Río Verde valley on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast. Public facilities at small sites and at the region’s largest precolumbian architectural complex, the Río Viejo acropolis, were the location not only of collective food consumption but also of food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Overholtzer.

Consumption, as Paul Mullins explains, "revolves around the acquisition of things to confirm, display, accent, mask, and imagine who we are and who we wish to be." Consumer choices of goods in the marketplace relate to the desire to connect oneself with particular networks of people and places on the landscape, and these connections play a role in the formation of personal and household identity. Here, I present research on the social dimensions inherent in economic practices, which are notably...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Morrow.

How were mass-produced consumer goods incorporated into everyday expressions of local and national identity in 19th and early 20th century Ireland? While archaeologists have explored the myriad ways that mass-produced goods circulated throughout the British Empire through networks of trade and exchange, less attention has been given to the way specifically British manufactured goods were incorporated into meaningful practices of material consumption within Irish communities. This project...

DATASET Walter Crist.

This dataset contains artifact counts for every space in Bronze Age Cypriot settlements in which game boards were found. Artifact classes are explained in: Crist, Walter. 2016. Games of Thrones: Board Games and Social Complexity in Bronze Age Cyprus. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson. Joshua Wright. Linda A. Brown.

Archaeologists routinely engage with concepts of space and materiality as we inscribe meanings onto the architecture and objects left behind by past peoples. However, in doing so, we bring explicitly modern sensibilities to our interpretations. In this paper, we consider alternative interpretations of space and materiality as described by Classic Maya people (250-900 CE). We ask: In what ways do categorizations and interpretations of space at Maya archaeological sites change when traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morehart.

Scientists debate the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. But as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene is recent. And as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene projects a cosmology across history. This paper specifically examines how this cosmology understands the materiality of infrastructures, the built substrate upon which networks of human and non-human worlds intersect and collide. I argue that this cosmology contrasts infrastructures of the recent past as dangerous and polluting against...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilona Bausch.

This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jadeitite from the Itoigawa source was highly valued among hunter-gatherers inhabiting the Japanese archipelago during the Jomon period, circulating widely from its discovery during the late Early Jomon (c. 4000 BCE) until the end of the period (c. 400 BCE). While there is some indication that raw...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Nassaney.

Fort St. Joseph was one of many French colonial outposts established throughout the St. Lawrence River Valley and the western Great Lakes region in the late 17th-18th centuries to cultivate alliances with Native peoples. The result was an exchange, amalgamation, and reinterpretation of material goods that testify to the close relationships the French maintained with various Native American groups. Yet, closer examination suggests that both the French and Natives employed material goods in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Houston’s "The Life Within" is among the most perceptive and nuanced statements on Classic Maya materials and the animate quality of things. Here, I draw inspiration from this future-classic work to more deeply probe Maya understandings of bone – a material most generally treated by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Chiykowski-Rathke.

How sherds ultimately enter the archaeological record reflect the roles and beliefs regarding the discard, reuse and repurposing of pottery across the Southwest US and Northwest Mexico. This paper examines the deposition of whole vessels and ceramic sherds from Cerro de Trincheras, Sonora, Mexico. It compares two contexts: the debris of domestic spaces, and the careful internment of vessels as part of mortuary ritual. The ceramic deposition practices of Trinchereños (Trincheras Tradition...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

Human beings use three signalling systems, words, actions and material which differ in their replication rates, the degree to which the signals persist and their magnitude. Speech replicates rapidly and transmits a signal over a small distance that last only briefly. Action in the form of positioning and gestures replicates more slowly and can carry its signal for somewhat longer. Material by contrast is replicated more slowly, sometimes very slowly. Material signals, such as the dimensions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Dupuy. Elissa Bullion. Galymzhan Kiyasbek. Erbolat Rakhmankulov. Aidyn Zhuniskhanov.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric site of Koken, located in the semiarid foothills of eastern Kazakhstan, records a deep history of human occupation spanning the Mesolithic to historical periods. Our research at Koken since 2019 has focused on an integrated habitation, rock art, and cemetery complex dating to the Bronze Age. We will present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Stricker. Luke J. Pecoraro.

In January of 1785, George Washington began work to create a western vista that would be visible from his home based on European landscape design principles. This process included developing and redesigning the grounds around the mansion into a single system, reshaping the upper and lower gardens, laying out a bowling green, planting shrubberies and wildernesses, and planning walks around and through these elements. Archaeological investigations in the spring of 2014 focused on the north...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Mattson.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The placement of colorful ornaments, marine shell, and minerals in discrete ritual deposits is a long-lived practice in the Ancestral Pueblo region. This tradition is exemplified in Chaco Canyon, where numerous ceremonial deposits comprised of such objects have been documented in kivas and other rooms within great houses....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Jones.

Excavations at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery produced a large subset of burials showing evidence of autopsy and dissection. In addition to the osteological evidence of autopsy and dissection, these burials also contained broken equipment and medical refuse which reflect the medical, pedagogical, and medicolegal procedures in use at the turn of the last century. An incorporated study of these materials is necessary to examine the connection between the practical engagement with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II: Current Research in Oaxaca Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Figurines, as small, portable anthropomorphic and zoomorphic ceramic images, provide insights into a range of representational and symbolic concepts of the ancient Mesoamericans who created and interacted with them. Figurines have been interpreted as actively deployed in household rituals and social negotiations, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa M Overholtzer.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plus Ultra: An examination of current research in Spanish Colonial/Iberian Underwater and Terrestrial Archaeology in the Western Hemisphere." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In October 1519, the fiercely independent Tlaxcallan state first sent aid for Cortés’s conquest efforts, establishing a community of people who identified as Indigenous conquerors. By the mid-16th century, Indigenous peoples in Tlaxcala...